There are no missed chances in life, only a perspective guided by regret sees something lost in an unrealised act that is pure potentiality.

At one moment or another in our lives we come to that point where we get that nagging feeling of having missed a chance. It can be anything from meeting someone who could have helped us to missing out on a wonderful bargain to the big chances of a new job perspective or a life changing experience. In deliberation we always work with that unity of ‘a chance to…’ and when we weigh the pros and cons of a decision, there’s always that player called ‘a missed chance’ that we measure up and calculate our future luck with. It instils dread, fear even, that idea that we could miss our on something. Something different, something new, something that is potentially so many things.

There is no such thing as a missed chance.

I am aware that this is a rather bold statement, some might even find it plain wrong, others might be revolted by it, because they are so used to that idea.

The truth of the matter however is that the truly missed chances are extremely rare. Much rarer than we’d think.

What is a chance? And when is it really gone? When have we truly missed it?

There are so many good words on how you have to make your own chances, how you need to seize the moments that across the history of human through have drizzled down on us until they form a certain pressure that puts us on edge, turned towards the future constantly waiting for that chance, or turned towards the past constantly analysing our decisions and separating them into ‘missed chances’ and ‘used chances’.
Life isn’t that straight forward and if a chance came with a clear label, which fool would walk by it and miss it on purpose?

If we analyse the concept of a ‘chance’, then one element becomes apparent rather quickly: a chance is never empty. It’s a chance to act, to do something. Thus it is always like to a certain theory of action. A second element is that a ‘a chance’ almost always leads to a decision. Obviously by it being linked to action, the decision mostly is about doing one thing or another and that leads to the third element which is change. There rarely is a ‘chance’ that does not involve some degree of change.

But the concept of chance is just a short way of stating a situation. It’s an abbreviation. For what ?

If we look a bit closer a the first element stated above, then we quickly realise that action requires assessment: action cannot be done without aim, goal or orientation. That’s what differentiates action from actionism, doing for doing’s sake. What is left out in the way we use ‘a chance’ in our deliberations today is the second part of the equation of reality: doing one thing means not doing something else.
Put this way, the ‘missed chance’ gets back its true value of a moment of decision and with that value, it isn’t any different from any other decision. The added value of change most often veils that fact. Even if in hindsight we are aware that we decided on one thing rather than on another, at the moment of decision, the fear of missing something, missing a chance, has the dangerous quality of making us miss that fundamental second part. In hindsight we barely see the chance anymore, focused on the decision. But that is only one kind of ‘missed chances’.
Another kind is the one we only see in hindsight. And aren’t these the most bitter ones? The moments when we go back and analyse and think that we make a wrong choice, thus missing that elusive thing that was a chance.
Both visions are askew and limiting. An old motto states that we are our decisions. Put in front of the backdrop of the above analysis, this suddenly becomes a true statement. Every single decision, may we qualify it through our vision on time as good or bad, shapes the here and now, the person that we are now and thus also said vision on our past. The smallest change would change the person that we are today and it also would change our vision on the past and so forth. This basic reality takes on a prominent role in the rather popular rules of time travel and its paradoxes. (Cf. the concept of the butterfly effect in chaos theory and its use in pop culture such as The Butterfly Effect [movie] or in time traveller Hiro’s story arc in Season 6 of  the TV series Heroes )
But in everyday life, where we don’t go back in time to change our lives or the lives of others, to shape ourselves to our own wishes, all we’re left with is the future and while our mind is so tempted to turn back and divide our decisions into good ones and bad ones, into missed chances, misfortunes, missed encounters and mistakes.

I’ve stated that there is no such thing as a missed chance. Usually self-examination, understanding our actions, serves the purpose of learning which then ultimately should lead to avoiding mistakes or repeating bad behaviour. In the case of a ‘missed chance’ such introspection falls flat, because there is not an iota that is changeable about it, or it wouldn’t be a ‘missed chance’.

Everything that is based on the concept of ’seizing or using that chance’ and its twin of ‘missing a chance’ is next to useless as a lesson. The same chance can never present itself and we can’t go back. All that a self-analysis of that nature accomplishes is that it makes living with our decisions that much harder. This is particularly the case since we only ever consider our failures that way. Nobody ever sees a positively missed chance at misfortune for instance. This is reinforced by the nature of pure potentiality of the so called ‘missed chance’. In truth, we have no idea how the other decision could have turned out. It could have just as probably led to disappointment as ‘missing the chance’ could have led us to happiness. It’s our visions from the present that accounts for that. Be are further along the way when we do an introspection and analyse our past, have understood more, have experienced more and that lets us have a clearer view so to speak. Using that clearer view and more knowledge to devalue our own decisions however can only ever lead to a bitter consideration of ourselves and our past.

I would advocate for trust rather than a chance. Trust in ourselves. That we make our decisions to the best of our knowledge at the time and that they are the deep expression of our reality. That we do what we can to lead a sound life. Turning ourselves constantly towards the past, reminiscing about what would have been the better choice, not only blocks the present, but ultimately scares us to stand up to the future.

Silence and creativity are linked and if we manage to free the one with the aid of the other, we might not just become better artists or better ‘creators’, but also we might achieve better understanding of ourselves and the people we are hoping to reach.

One of my twitter contacts – Masafumi Matsumoto – is following the Artist’s Way at the moment and his insights on his blog on this experience are pretty revealing and a great read.
This week, he has issued a challenge to everyone who’s reading him and following him, to simply ‘not read’. One of the exercises of The Artist’s Way is to abstain yourself from reading for a week and observe the effect on your own creativity.
Now, the Artist’s Way is something that has become very popular in the mid-80ies and the synthesiser of this method Julia Cameron has opened the creative pathways for a lot of people with her method (which incidentally came from years and years of teaching courses with the same aim. In that the book differs a lot from other ’self-help’ or ’self-teaching’ books on writing, creativity, and artistic expression.) and with the rise of chatter of our everyday online and social life oversounding our creative selves from our, is as relevant as ever.

When I came across the Artist’s Way a couple of years ago, I struggled greatly with the ‘reading abstinence’ as an assignment. This was before the internet became more a means of communication and exchange, and still was a tool for research and the occasional replacement for a physical written letter.
Reading is an integral step in the construction of our shared social and personal realities. The universe we construct around ourselves and within us are made up of various kinds of building stones: reading is an integral part of the cement that link those stones. It’s not just the dialogical nature – explained best in Gadamer’s method in Wahrheit und Methode – of every text, but much more the witnessing a thought outside the confines of our own mind that hold these said building stones together. Without it, they become a wall that keeps us within our own reality and soon cannot be overcome by any argument or realisation. Or to say it differently: instead of stepping onto those building stones and looking ahead, we step down and dig ourselves into the ground and the building stones just become a wall keeping our gaze from the horizon.

While I still hold the above, coming back to the Artist’s Way – thanks to mma323 – and that famous week of reading abstinence I see the profound truth in Cameron’s exercise that I failed to before.
Because today I deeply feel that the overall chatter that surrounds us today has increased and continues to increase still. It’s suggested to us by a whole set of social pressures that we need to be efficient, constantly online, constantly reachable and constantly ’there’ or something is wrong with us. That pressure of efficiency then pushes us to fill every little minute between greater actions such as work or shopping etc. will said chatter. A quick check on your email here, a quick read through the latest headlines there and the small moment that could have served in silence to recollect ourselves and our thoughts is gone. This immediateness and the contraction of distances between people make for a rise in stress that can be remedied fairly easily. (Fairly easily, because recent studies concerning the peer pressure through Facebook et al. suggest that leaving the chatter for a while can actually harm your social contacts.)

But for what? In the Artist’s way, the goal is clear: to free your creative spirits and pathways, free yourself to write, draw, paint, express and in the end find yourself again. Web 2.0, where the emphasis lies on the exchange and the us, makes this even more important. Whereas our exchange on the web is based on the basic structure of ‘I transmit’ – ‘You comment’ – ‘We discuss/exchange etc.’, the Artist’s Way emphasieses a return to the ‘I do’ – ‘I create’.
In a way it goes back to the first step, before you share. Redefining ‘what’ you transmit on the Web and through the new media. Without that the content of what you want to share becomes vacant, empty and we then immediately start to fill it up with nonsensical self-production. We all do it. All the time.

So, maybe the lesson here isn’t just: stop reading, stop using this or that service, but rather: think about what you share and don’t lose yourself in it.

A reading abstinence certainly helps to get a clear idea of what we all consume on a regular basis. It also serves to give value back to what we really end up reading rather than being intellectually bulimic with our everyday intake of the written word. Because in the same way bulimia is disproportionate and leaves you without healthy nutrition, so is and overuse of the new means of the transmission of knowledge and opinion in the digital age.

Creating patches of silence in our lives will not only open up creative influences, but it will also give back value to our interactions and that in turn will lead us to a better understanding of each other, because only when we have the feeling that people are actually listening to what we have to say and not just quickly taking notice of it, can we assume the true basis of exchange and mutual understanding.

If Human Sciences, are not proper sciences, then where will we stop to devalue human thought and its history? Can you even argue with people who can only accept their own ground of discussion? Why the study of philosophy and thus thought, truly is the only science around.

This week a rather interesting and revealing discussion broke out on my Twitter Feed. The initial kick-off was given by a list of ‘The best 100 scientific Twitterers’ and a revised edition as a twitter list published by @terrorzicke (Name ist Programm – her nick is program).
As member of the Human Sciences, obviously, a friend of mine immediately asked why there were no philosophers (or Scientists in the Liberal Arts for that matter) to be found on her ‘scientific’ list. The crude and simple answer that she reinforced through the subsequent (heated) argumentation was, that Human Sciences are not sciences. (Best laughable tweet out of that discussion: “Geisteswissenschaften kreisen im Gegensatz zu den Naturwissenschaften im Grunde um sich selbst.”  “Human Sciences revolve – to the contrary of natural sciences – only around themselves”)

I won’t go into the depths of that lion pit. It’s pretty much useless to try and reason with people who allow themselves opinions on things they clearly have no idea of. It would be more interesting to try and reason with a cup of coffee. At least, if there is no response, you get a decent shot of caffeine out of it.
I’ll only put one thought out there and it’s one that becomes quite clear if you’ve ever interested yourself for neurological sciences.
There are a lot of ‘natural’ things out there that we can study and analyse in many different ways. The purely materialistic, descriptive way, being one of them – the purely scientific way in the above cited way of thinking. The analysis of the language in which this is made however would already be a ‘human scientist’ way of looking at things.
Without the ordering and the reflection of philosophy which goes beyond the raw material, all we would have is nothing more than a huge stack of information such as the colour red solicits a neuron fire with such and such intensity taking into account the context and situation. But how it is that we can reference that red, or what it means for a thing to be red (even though scientifically speaking the colour red doesn’t exist) which will then lead us to the problem of accidental properties as opposed to essential ones, the theory of individuation and personal identity and so forth… all these questions are philosophical ones and per the cited definition ‘not scientific’.

It is a common misconception that within the confines of Human Sciences anything goes. People from the outside think that we continuously weave our insignificant web of thoughts around a comfortable glass of wine and a good laugh within our own idiosyncratic language, pleasuring ourselves in our own brain juice.
‘Scientificity’ realises itself within the confines of a method. If the method is faulty, no physicist can work. Neither can a philosopher or a linguist or a literate. Far away is the concept that ‘anything goes’. You might gain great popularity among a certain crowd by being without a method (Derrida for instance), but the fame is temporary. (Not one of Derrida’s direct students is still working with his thought. Parts of his method of deconstruction – which isn’t a method truly – but not the complete version and for the next generation of students Derrida will be a relic, not a school anymore.)

As someone who edits texts that have never before seen a printed edition, texts that remain unheard and inaccessible for the scientific community of Medievalists, I work with quantifiable method and scientific means such as distribution, probability, semantic quantities etc. to near myself as closely as ever possible to the original text which is most cases is lost. If you imagine that for the more popular texts you have between 30 and 50 surviving manuscripts and thus potentially 30 to 50 different versions of a text, it becomes immediately apparent why the claim that this can’t by any means be considered science is laughable. Not only do I have to go through that very materialistic part of my work, but after years of that exploring the material support of the text in question (it’s just the characters and the vellum really), I then proceed to the interpretation of the text itself, trying to explain what it’s all about. And only in a third last step do I examine that theory against the ‘bigger picture’ (does it make sense in itself? does it apply to opponents at the time it was written? what do we learn from it in terms of overall realisation? etc.)
In my particular case, as Historians of Philosophy, we are the badly loved kid of all the departments. For the historians, we’re not really historians; for the philosophers, we’re not really philosophers and for the editors, we know way to much to gain quick money with us. Truth of the matter is: we are everything and nothing. We need to have all the instruments a historian needs, all the knowledge and methods a philosopher does and we need to have a decent technical approach to texts and their transmission through the ages. We do it all, and yet, nobody takes us seriously.
So, it’s been long that I have taken anybody for full who claims that this is not science.

In some definitions ‘science’ is defined by the fact that you open up new grounds or that you create the basis for thought and study. It’s clear that with my work, I do just that. Without text editions, our look on a certain period will always remain limited, because the huge cellars of the major libraries of Europe are filled will texts that have never been read by a larger public after the 16th century.

Interestingly enough of course, none of those arguments which my friend made in said Twitter debate were accepted. Neither were mine. To the question why the person was ignoring me in particular, it was said that ‘who protects their tweets doesn’t want to be heart’.

Now, that brings me to another small truth, this time about our modern means of communication. Today, we’re always supposed to be online, always supposed to be linked to that behemoth internet, and if we don’t reply immediately to an email or a text, something is clearly wrong. And yes, if you are stupid enough to protect your privacy because you want to know who is following you, you do not want to be heard.
Yes, I protect my updates, I also protect my Facebook profile, but because the majority of users have lost all sense of the truth that on the opposite side of them sits a real person in front of that PC screen.

The fact that Terrorzicke didn’t want to see what I had to say to her (it would have been easy enough for her to ask for authorisation, it takes one click after all), just shows what happens to people when they don’t want to be reasoned with: they become a caricature of themselves.

Protecting myself from complete exposure over the internet doesn’t mean that I don’t want to be heard, it rather tells you that when I accept you, I have properly seen you and want to enter into contact without. You’re not just another one of the mass that I don’t care about. And it will tell you that I don’t like to be spammed and have a pretty solid knowledge of spammers, useless twittbots and the like.

It becomes very apparent, that people who cannot even reconstruct an act of volition without error, cannot be asked to qualify what is scientific and what is not. And that is why this whole discussion is pointless. Who doesn’t want to hear, will never hear, not matter how loud we shout it.
Human thought will always be an exhilarating subject of study, while the measures of ’scientificity’ will always be subject to the last and current fashion of the times in which they are uttered.

In times of the internet and the quick use of any copy/paste function, where the transmission of thoughts and discussions is so immediate, does the term of Plagiarism even still make sense?

This week two topics concerning cheating in writing (also known as: Plagiarism) have hit the major media. They are – at first sight – diametrically opposed, but reveal a lot about how we see the art of creation, the writing business and how web 2.0 and modern means of communication are shaping our intellectual food and why it is that we are starving.

The first case involved star philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, a French self-made thinker (in every sense of the term applicable)¹ who has construed his career on said media exposition for the last decades. His latest book ‘On War in philosophy’ – which with the according exposure and the current need for answers on this topic – has been longingly awaited by the chic well-meaning, slightly world removed circles of professional brow frowners of the current Zeitgeist circles ². It is only a small ironical value of that BHL (his official trademark) has now been beaten down by the same feuilltons that usually hail him and applaud every undertaking that the great mind publicises ³. Yes, the man has been proven to be unable to do proper research. He can be seen citing a fictitious writer and his slightly less fictitious texts in his latest work. Less fictitious? The author in question is an invention by a French satritical writer Frédèric Pagès from a renowned satire paper called Le Canard Enchaîné (The Chained Duck) and was meant to wear the armour of champion of the 20th century Anti-Katian movement. The character of Jean-Baptiste Botul had so much success upon his invention that the journalist then went on to publish the invented oeuvre.
Apart from BHL missing the very basic sense and curiosity – which should and can be expected from a ’professional thinker’ – to solidify his own thought based on his sources (it would have taken him a simple Google search to unverify this quoted author), the interesting point here, is not the King’s dethronement. At least not for me. It’s as usual the scene around the throne that interests me more.

The moment in the book where this fictitious source ⁴ was used (or so they tell me, because I confess to not having it read yet), is a critical one: it quotes back to a conference the dear BHL had given last year at the Ecole Normale Supérieure ⁵, using it as what science calls an argument of authority for his own thought and he is quoting a real text written by a satirical journalist (who per se has nothing to say on the matter of wars, thought or metaphysics) who himself has invented a well thought out author with a fitting biography. Now Frédèric Pagès didn’t have in mind to gully people into thinking this was true thought by an actual thinker when he published the works of conferences by Jean-Baptiste Botul. However, BHL’s quoting – even if it’s a funny story – validates the thoughts within these conferences supposedly given in Brazil after the end of WWII.

The point to be made here is the following: No matter how a thought, a critique or a stance came into the world, through satire, through joke, it’s validity isn’t given by it’s author alone, their standing or by the measure that modern booklists give them, but by their applicability to the world. Clearly, something must have sounded right in BHL’s ears to have quoted it that way.

The second event has been breaking across the internet and the major media in Germany. About three weeks ago a certain Helene Hegemann (18) has published her first novel: Axolotl Roadkill. The feuilltons and critics hailed the book as the best portrayal of the current young generation, the generation of the zero years (ie. 2000 to 2009), a new ‘Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo’ for a new generation, even though it’s content merely shows – using a crude and current language which involves barely anything above the belt line – the general loss of orientation of kids today. Helene Hegemann is no Christiane F., she lacks the genuine problems that allowed other artists to be inspired by her fate. (cf. for instance Cristiane F., the album by David Bowie or the movie). In all truth, all these two girls have in common is that they both showed us their state of mind. Where the one from the 70ies was in no area of her life adapting or working things out and spiralling deeper and deeper into drug addiction and the follow up tragedies, the other one at the start of a new decade of a new millennium shows how much she really has adapted herself to the world and how it works.  Not a single so-called intellectual writer has dared to ask the proper questions, the only newspaper that didn’t review the book was the Zürich based Tagesanzeiger, they found the book apparently too bland and polished ⁶.

It took a simple blogger. A citizen journalist to find out that Hegemann had copied most parts of her first novel off the internet and a particular blog. A fact that the editor immediately declared a detail which the author however failed to mention anywhere. The journalists that had cherished her before… did not drop her. They were ready for the 360 for her new found prodigy, suggesting in all earnestly (the editor and author later confirmed that idea) that copying and using like that was part of the new generation’s ways of communicating, of appreciating the world and that it was completely acceptable for youngsters today. And that’s where the big division is taking place. Nobody seems to want to believe the feuilltonists at this point, because the internet is exploding with people crying outrage ⁷.

Why is that? Because plagiarism is a crime? Because we have a right to what we create? Because… they should know better?

For me personally plagiarism is the worst possible kind of intellectual cannibalism (there are nuances in my head, yes) and just as with real cannibalism, some people might find it acceptable, others might not even consider the idea, for people that live from what they write and accomplish with words, the ethical dimensions are similar to real cannibalism. In a time where students at university think that research means ‘looking it up on google’ and where plagiarism is becoming the standard (in the Philosophy Dept. with three profs alone here in Geneva, there are at least 3 cases per semester), who honestly can be shocked about a girl copying her novel?

It’s the main paradigm of post-modernism that nothing in the world can be reinvented, that everything has been said and thought and that we are all just quoting, thus rendering true art as an act of creation obsolete. This has been the first step to devalue and invalidate the creative act and it is the first paving stone of the road we are on now.

The main question to ask is obviously how the critics can hold on to their prodigal kid by claiming that copying is actually ‘ok’ as long as it’s a ‘thing that kids just do’?

The answer is pretty simple: because plagiarism only makes sense in a written world. Where the written (and printed) word has meaning and a certain authoritative value.
The internet has a colloquial sense to it, and kids today are much more geared towards conversation and immediateness. It’s no wonder they are so in-to-the-net. It satisfies the basic need of every kid or teenager or tween: I want it now and I want it all ⁸. Add to that that an author in the internet or of a blog is a very abstract entity. The fact that bits and bytes represent the text don’t help. A text in printing ink just is so much more imposing and… real.

Two cases, two countries that seemingly have nothing to do with one another. In my view they do. Whereas in BHL’s case, the scientific research, everything is given to the authority of the text, in Hegemann’s case, a novel, nothing is given to the source and there is no argument of authority other than the one of the critics who elevated her. In both cases the reader is left under-nourrished and disappointed.

We buy books and pay authors for various reasons. But no matter what the context is, be it scientific, intellectual or fiction, we pay them for their creativity. We pay them because they spent time on something that we haven’t thought of or don’t have the time to, they created something. They thought and had a will to do something with it.
The discussion about plagiarism, what it is and what it isn’t, what it should be and what it can’t be is an ongoing one. The latest book on the subject has only just come out ⁹. As readers, we live from the illusion that we are reading something new. Whether it’s true or not, is secondary. When German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer ¹⁰ stated that when we read a text, we throw ourselves (as the complete being with our social realisation etc.) in front of the progression of the text, that we assume and accept the text as an authority that has to tell us something, he revealed the non-dictum that others fail to see today. Texts are universes. They are very talkative universes. They manipulate, they play with Gadamer’s basic assumption, they shock and they hurt ¹¹. And we all take it. We take it because we believe that the authors have done their work. They have created something. For us.

It’s when we realise that they have cheated and lied that the whole building collapses on itself. Not only does writing become insignificant – limited to the simple machinality of a couple of keystrokes between ctrl+c and ctrl+v -, but ultimately reading is nothing more than listening to the constant jabber of everyday life when it should be elevating us, should inspire us and should make us dream or think.

ADDENDUM: Meanwhile, the Book Expo of Leipzig as nominated Axolotl Roadkill for their 2010 book prize (45.000 Euro). Looking at the standing now, it might not win, but who knows. To not completely throw out their chances, the editor has now issued a nervous telegram stating that in the fourth edition of the book, a ‘list of sources’ would be included. I’ve been fortunate enough to take a look at it and it’s seven pages long and presents itself as an evident alibi. The last paragraph of said list states: “Dieser Roman folgt in Passagen dem ästhetischen Prinzip der Intertextualität und kann daher weitere Zitate enthalten.” which translates to this: This novel follows in certain passages the aestetical principle of intertexuality and may thus contain more quotations (than listed here).
Intertextuality, dear friends, is a scientific concept that became popular in the late 60ies and early 70ies (under Kristeva and the rising movement of psychoanalytical thought in literature and critique of structuralism ie. poststructuralism. It’s not an aestetic principle, it’s a variation of what I referred to as the postmodern principle (“nothing can be said without quoting anything”). Intertextuality uses any given text as a marking point. It doesn’t necessarily quote it, it doesn’t necessarily plagiarise it and it certainly doesn’t use it in a cannibalistic sense. Shame on the editor who obviously were looking for a new child prodigy and through people weren’t intelligent enough to notice their foul play and now try to hide behind scientific concepts that they have no idea of. The King is truly naked.

Obviously, I ran across Eastmountainsouth sooner or later, since they keep being bumped to my shuffle list. I had already covered the group as a true songwriter jewel, but seeing as their only album never had a sequel and it doesn’t look like they ever will do music together again, I thought about posting a follow-up to Peter Bradley Adams, the brains and voice behind Eastmountainsouth.

Since 2001, he has released several albums with various female singers to contrast his ‘the dreamy-voiced Adams’ as The Boston Globe called him. Gather Up (2006), Leavetaking (2008) and the latest album Traces (2009) all hold more or less the same layered quality of harmony that was so typical for Eastmountainsouth and that drew so many in.

Out of the three I feel like Traces – a fitting title – has come back to those roots in a way that closes the circle while giving this artist more maturity and depth, even if I wouldn’t have thought it possible. There is a certain calm quality about the construction of his songs and the sound. ‘Even’, ‘polished’, are words that springs to mind, and ‘touching’ another one.

In May 2009, “Leavetaking” the IAP awarded Peter Bradley Adams IAP’s the award “Best CD’s of 2008″ for Best Singer-Songwriter-Male.

Even so, with awards and even with steady releases, Adams has never truly made it into the charts or has been featured in popular TV Series (usually a good way to get people to notice you).
This circumstance earns him a special entry in my series. I hope you enjoy.

Indulge me for a moment, it might be worth your while. Maybe it’ll irate you to read what follows, maybe it will give you something to think about. Your pick.

Web 2.0 was supposed to bring us all closer together. Fair enough. With Facebook and Twitter and co. everyone has found their little niche in which the investment that it takes to stay in touch with people has been minimised in order to maximise the immediate access to everyone. You don’t have to actually talk to someone to know that they’re still alive and actually doing ok. Just look at their Facebook activities or have a quick look at their latest tweets. All good. No need for an intervention.

Now, I don’t want to bring out all the usual sociological observations about the change in social interaction and how peer pressure passes through these new media nowadays or even the economic ideas behind something like Farmville. It’s been said. What I am more interested here is on a much more basic level than that. The online games. Facebook has done a good job at implementing the different games into an easy accessible game fix during the day directly in Facebook. I am the first one who likes the occasional Bejweled and I am also on Farmville.
Lately however a rather conservative and yes, Christian part of my acquaintances on Facebook have started to become nothing short of obsessed with Farmville. The stressed out status updates have worried me for a while, and when I heard in a podcast about the matter, that some people actually to believe that this game helps them to ‘solidify’ friendships and help them knit together more distant contacts from their work or a priest to his parishioners, I am falling rather silent and that pretty quickly.

Yes, I am also on Farmville, and sure it’s a fun thing, but do I map my days according to it? Or does the game still follow my day? That’s the main question to be asked here. But let’s stay on the idea that it solidifies friendships and contacts for a moment. How does someone reach that conclusion (other than excuse the addictive influence the game has already had on their lives) ?

Having friendships, an exchange of opinions and human contact in general takes time, it takes energy and it can be tiring. Particularly when you work in an environment that delivers a certain service, in a way people always think that you have to be receptive to them no matter what. So, these games lower that amount of energy that is needed in order to keep up with your friends, or colleagues. Because at other times, you are not up to give the time in order to stay ten minutes after mass or after work in order to get the community juices flowing and knit the group or friendships together. Or you just can’t be bothered to pick up that telephone and spend 40 min. talking to someone. Why not drop them a line on their wall or help out on their farm. Surely that’s enough.

And all of a sudden, you find yourself having spent 40 min. on Farmville. The same amount it would have taken in RL to talk to someone, listen and process something. Instead you’ve been clicking about 250 times on a virtual farm and in all actually built nothing.

Yes, of course Zynga and thus Farmville does charity and yes, of course it’s just fun.

But am I really and truly the only one seeing the obvious here? The world is becoming more and more solitary for each and everyone of us and not because it is becoming less and less beautiful (although that certainly is a reason), but because friendships that can be maintained only virtually, through the web, aren’t really worth a whole lot, are they? Or where are your Farmville friends when RL really hits you?
It doesn’t help that the only people that actually to say something about this state of ‘the world’s gone mad’ are people like Dr. Phil on MTV or other similar ‘convincing’ media outlets.
The idea to unclutter your life and start to become an influence in the people around you seems completely lost in this respect and yes, I am sorry, I am shocked at how many decent Catholics (Amercian and other) in my contact list have actually broken out in hysteria over their lost bonus’ every time Facebook has a glitch or is slow. These are the same people who are adamant about a lot of things (some of them might even condemn you to hell if you don’t vote properly, whatever properly is) and for them the impetus to love and be charitable is a truth in their lives. I doubt they realise just how much time it is that they are wasting and how much more could be done in the time they play Farmville.

It’s time to really ask what the social media is actually about? And what will it be about in the future years? Because in the beginning, it was supposed to be about people and their interaction either with content givers or creators or with other readers and users. Not to sound completely pessimistic, but if the nature of interaction is constantly lowered (Letter to Email to FB message to FB Wall Post to ‘I’m tending your crops’ on Farmville) then what about the nature of exchange and in that respect people themselves? Can there even come anything out of it that does not spell intellectual poverty?

SQPN: The Secrets of Farmville #1
Farmville entry on Wikipedia
Welwoche Ausgabe 04/10 u.A. zum Thema Facebook

The Apple Tablet and its craze offers more than just the prospect of a shiny new geek toy: my take on a rumour and a symbol of hope.

Mashable. com is usually not known for their intellectual insight in things. It’s a site for news about new media and computers. It’s a synthesising site, that will mash up all the news into small and quickly readable articles. It does a great job at it and I am glad that I don’t have to read 20 articles to get the same info. So, thank you Mashable.
However, I was amazed to read the lead title of one of their latest articles on the famed ‘ipad’ or simply the Apple Tablet this morning which is supposed to come out today: “Why the idea of the Apple Tablet May Be Better Than the Reality”.

Truly platonic.

The article then states that “as a rumor, the Apple tablet can be anything to anyone.”

A bit less platonic.

Still. The point stands to be argued. It’s a common truth that things that don’t have a substantiated reality either based in experience or axiomatic proof, are free to be filled with whatever it is that we need. The idea of being with someone, the idea of love, the idea of being in love, the idea of being successful, the idea of being famed… they all are wonderful in themselves and as such they guide our thoughts if not our dreams, because they are devoid of reality. Because come to think of it, being in love means a lot of work, staying in love even more; being successful means having to work and compromise and then compromise some more, being famed means you’ll expose yourself to a whole set of problems you wouldn’t have otherwise etc. etc.

Mashable states the same thing: “The anticipation and the lofty expectations surrounding the product launch put the Apple tablet atop a pedestal. Once the curtain lifts, it could take years before it returns to the same level of glory.”

The same is true with any high idea. It can be argued however that the ’same level of glory’ is reached much earlier in the process. By filling what up to that point was just an empty idea, potentiality in every sense possible, the thing, your dream becomes truly real. And that in itself gives it more weight and more glory than a simple idea ever could. A lost love is always better than no love at all, and a dream in itself is bound to be killed either by use or reality.

The conclusion is basic really: dreams and ideas are bound to be destroyed, replaced and remade. Reality has that crushing quality like nothing else out there.

As for the whole question about the Apple Tablet. Will it be great? I have no doubt about it. Will it save the printing industry as Mashable states the Apple fans? Absolutely not. Will it be an actual concurrence to the e-readers such as the Kindle or the Nook? Probably not. Will it advance the victory over said e-readers over the traditional book? No.

There is a certain distinctive quality that comes with every single book that a Kindle or Nook cannot replace, no matter how many pretty author pictures they put into their digitalised book formats. The physical appearance, the weight, the difference in paperweight, the font, the printing style… it all gives a book it’s primary qualities while the text, good or bad, gives it its character. Nothing in an e-reader can come even close to that particular thrill that you feel when you take a book into your hands before buying it, because something in its cover, appearance or title called out to you. All these e-readers will ever achieve is to be a tool in a world where multitasking is a standard and where we fill even the smallest minute with some kind of chatter (the book in the train, music while walking, your Hebrew course while working out…). And as such, the Apple Table wont change anything. If the rumours are correct and it is in fact a netbook, I doubt it will even establish as an e-reader. Because I personally, don’t need yet another PC to distract me from what I really want to do: read. With the touch of paper on my hands and sometimes the wonderful warm feeling that comes when you toss a book wholeheartedly into a corner or on the floor because the author really, really couldn’t resist drawing that card on you. Imagine doing that with a Kindle?

The e-readers, reading on the computer, OCR, surfing on the phone, being online all the time, web 2.0… they all have been empty ideas at some point. And then we started filling them up with real life use, with our own version of their initial form. So, no matter how much people want to see symbols of hope in the clouds or their tea leaves, the Apple Tablet or a President, it never, ever lifts the responsibility from us to make use of that symbol. Evaluate it and then actually use it, fill it up with meaning.

A crisis is never just overcome with symbols. But they certainly help to not lose hope completely.

Draw me a heart, my love,
to paint all over the walls,
over the airs of jealousy,
the hate and the flaws.

Draw me a heart the size
of your mountains,
your valleys and passions,
draw it large, draw it true,
and let me crawl up inside it.

Draw me a heart
to bury my fears in.
A heart for the future,
a heart for the past.

A heart in so many colours,
where flowers of blossoms past,
rain down on both our pains
and longings.

A heart so truthful,
it has no place in this world.

A heart so pure,
the sun would rival its glow.

Draw me a heart, my love.
Don’t leave me behind.
Let me paint it then,
over all the walls that keep
this darkness in.

A heart so pure, so truthful,
a heart so big, so bright.

It’ll be my world from now on.
We don’t need anything else.

A heart. It’s all it takes after all.

Whichever way we want to put it or analyse it, my current topic is communication. And in fact it has been for a while. Out of some silly idea of ‘I don’t always want to write about the same thing’ I’ve waited until I would have something more interesting to write about… but again, no such luck. The last four writing ideas on the back burner have been about communication. So instead of putting this one here as well on a list where it can wait, I am dragging it all out now. Because the wait for a new post is way too long and because I need to get back into some sort of stable writing in general.

Ever since I got married, I’ve been on the receiving end of some of the weirdest questions in existence: relationship advice. While certainly my relationship is one of the most amazing things that just works in my life (yes, mentally, psychologically and physically), I’ve never been particularly comfortable with talking about it. As if it was something out of time or I would jinx it by using it as an example. With the years that changed, simply because I saw how people in other relationships really use a system of powers and pressure that is completely absent from my marriage. It goes to show that when you really don’t want to be an example, you end up being one even more so. Or in other words I really had to say something about the usual relationship mistakes. What a shocker. The girl that waited until the age of 28 to get some action, actually had something to say about relationships. Who knows, I might just make a series out of this.

One thing that always seems to be a present bystander of any relationships are annoyances. The small things that the other does that keep upsetting you, that suddenly are the only thing that you see, hear, smell and yourself can think about. Does your spouse love rearranging the towels in your bathroom once you’re just out of the shower and actually have just finished putting them on the rack? Seriously, as if your way of folding them was so wrong and he needs to be cleaning up behind you. How insulting. How infuriating. How utterly useless and what a loss of time…!

Stop.

That’s right. Stop. That’s the right moment to stop the thoughts that start gathering momentum at the first occurrence, at the second have gained the physical force of an avalanche and at the 10th are reason enough to kick the other out of your home, life and future will.

Our minds and worlds are not permeable to everything and our thoughts and motivations aren’t visible to the outside. All the outside sees are actions. And with the wish to understand that should be infusing every relationship (lover or not), we start conjecturing, constructing and analyzing. And since we already are upset, the only explanation is tainted by annoyance. Only in rare occasions could we think that there was a good explanation to these actions. After all what possible GOOD explanation can there be to the fact of my husband rearranging the towels in our bathroom that were already stowed on a rack and thus per definition the bathroom cleaned up?

Asking would help. Talking about it would help. Breaking the cycle of ‘he’s just not happy with the way I do things. Tough.’ would certainly help. Because if you do, you’d be able to realise that there is no mean thought behind it, but that he likes doing it, that he’s not even realising that he’s doing it and that the way he does it, they DO use less space and dry faster.

Just like our motivations are not painted onto our actions, our partner doesn’t have a priviledged way into our mind or suddenly doted with the gift of telepathy to see what upsets us and what doesn’t. The debt of communication lies always on both sides of the couple. It’s the most important step any relationship can take. And one I’ve not lastly understood thanks to living my relationship over Skype for two years.

Not communicating even the upsetting things is not in any possible way something that ’spares’ your partner. (Even though you can wait to spill it all until a difficult moment has passed for instance.) Not stating what goes wrong only suffocates your relationship under the silence and eventually the annoyance will grow so strong, the cover of silence can’t cover it anymore. Because the key to annoyance is: it can’t be evacuated other than by addressing it.

NB. In case you were wondering… yes, my love does rearrange our towels and it took me a while to realise the level of absent thought behind it and that it was just a way of neatly putting things in our apartment. Doesn’t mean hubby doesn’t like the way I clean or the way I hold our house together OR the way I fold the towels. I still love him. He’s a quirk. But so am I.

There is a silence that destroys you. That annihilates everything you stand for, everything you fought for, all the pains you’ve endured and that made you. This kind of silence is a rejection of everything that you are and you’ve been. It’s a weird thing that silence which is the absence of something – namely talk, speech, exchange, connection etc. – can take on such violent forms. But there are situations in life where the things unsaid reveal much more about ourselves than the ones that we actually dare or care to voice.
In this kind of silence there is no peace, there’s only conjecture, construction, frustration and ultimately loss. Without word, there can be no understanding.

But then there are those other kinds of silences and one in particular can build things so much greater than words or explanation ever could. Sometimes, the “denial of words”-silence might mutate – without any real interference – into this latter kind, we could call it new silence.
It might take years or just a few hours. But ultimately that silence, that breaking of connection might spawn a new understanding. Thankfully enough as humans, we are able to forget and even the greatest horrors in life may lose their burning pain. They certainly leave their marks and they shape as much as anything else who we are and what we dream of, but with time, they’re shifted into the backgrounds of that huge scene of our consciousness. And one day we’ll wake up and our first thought isn’t that memory that broke our hearts, or that anger that made us forget all those important lessons of charity, forgiveness and love. We simply get over it. Over and beyond. Over and past it.

That’s the precise moment where the destructive silence can take on another twist and force and turn into forgiveness. Slowly. But once we’ve achieved that, whatever deserved explanation or laying out suddenly doesn’t need anymore clarification and things just become what they are, what they were more precisely.

Sometimes, a silence is a chance. And usually, as with anything, it takes two. One to be silent and the other to accept it.

I myself have just overcome such a silence of several years where no words could overcome what needed to be processed. Where projected ideas about past and future were blocking the way and view of the truth and the facts. I’ve fought that silence, have hated it, have loathed the person subjecting me to it, because of their inability to see me, hear me and accept me. And that silence has broken my heart on many occasions because I was forced into it. Because there was no ear, no possibility, no heart to listen.

And then one day, I just moved on. Laid it down at the altar of all sacrifices and got on with life. Not truly thinking that such things could indeed be overcome. Not for me. Redemption was for others. Or rather I didn’t trust myself to really get over it. I thought that something would always remain of that unspeakable pain.
Experiences and prayers later, suddenly there it was again, that thought that maybe, just maybe … or not? For years, it went on like that. Until one final day, the silence was no more. Without force or willing, but with a gentle turn of fates, suddenly the words flowed and whatever we thought needed saying suddenly had no power over us anymore.

Sometimes, a silence builds new things without us even noticing, without us even consciously working on doing it. Sometimes, those silences are bought with the pain of years past and sometimes what they build is a new house for our soul to live in.